Suddenly it is October, with golden light and fluffy clouds,
and on one of these beautiful autumn days last week, over on West
Twenty-something between 9th and 10th Avenues, I stopped
to look at a plain brass doorknob on one of the old houses. The house was empty
and being renovated in an expensive way, judging by the look of things, but the
original front door, and its doorknob, had not been bothered yet. I liked the
doorknob because of its sturdy matter-of-fact shape, and I went up the stoop to
take a picture of it. Down on the sidewalk a lady wearing a black hat, who looked to be somewhere in her 80s, had stopped to look at the
house too. When I came back down she asked me if I owned it. She was the type
of person who isn’t at all surprised by somebody who just wants a picture of a
doorknob, and she told me that in the early 1960s this house we were looking at
would have cost $8,000 to buy. “Chelsea was really dangerous back then,” she
said. “I mean really, very, dangerous!” A house like this in Chelsea goes for
millions now, she told me.

We walked towards 9th Avenue together and she told me that she lives on the East Side now but she’d come over West to visit a friend. She
told me that when she was a girl she lived in another terrible neighborhood,
South Brooklyn, which was also very dangerous way back when, and that now, of
course, it is extremely expensive and called Park Slope. I asked her if she
remembered the plane crash on 7th Avenue there in that part of
Brooklyn, and she said she remembered it like it was yesterday. How sad, she
said, the way the pilot tried to make it to Prospect Park but just couldn’t,
and so the plane crashed onto 7th Avenue. I’ve known many people
from Brooklyn who remember that day very well, and all of them remember the
little boy who survived the crash and was found sitting on the curb somehow,
stunned. But he didn’t live, his lungs had been too badly damaged, and to this
day, in the main waiting room of big Methodist Hospital on 7th Avenue, there is a plaque in his honor—I’ve seen it—with the coins he had in his
pocket, including a buffalo nickel. I’m not sure why, but it was the nickel that
made my eyes prick when I looked at the plaque. You’d never imagine a plane had
crashed there to look at that spot now.

The lady asked me where I live and I told her, and she
wondered if I had heard the bomb when it exploded on West 23rd
Street—the one the terrorist put in the dumpster outside the big building where
all the blind people live—and I told her that I had, because it was so loud
that it shook my old building. I told her that I felt the blast in my heart,
which I did, and I knew right away that it was a bomb. She too had heard it,
but it was distant. She said it had made a curious sort of whoosh, not loud,
but different. It wasn’t like most city noises she’s used to. But she didn’t
think too much of it before seeing the news, she said, because so many new
noises can be heard in the city now, with all of the construction going on and all
of the changes. And, she said, lots of old city sounds have become obsolete.

I thought
about foghorns when she said that, because I don’t think we hear them the way
we used to in the city. It used to be that many of the boats up and down the Hudson
and the East River had foghorns that would make deep resonant blasts on
foggy nights—one hears them in old movies made in New York—but we
don’t hear them much at all anymore now. And when I think about it, there isn’t as much fog as
there once was either. I wondered if London has less fog now, too. I thought of
an old thriller, I think Richard Widmark might have been in it, and an
atmospheric scene with a man looking for an address somewhere way over in the
East thirties, which turned out to be a dismal rooming house with gaslight and
a terrible old landlady at the door in her housecoat. And the foghorns coming
from the blackness that was the river somehow made everything feel much more
lonely and dark and threatening over there at the edge of the world. I wondered
as we got close to 8th Avenue if global warming is the reason for
there being less fog, and I thought about how much I love the fog when it does
come and roll through the streets of New York. I thought of a foggy night on my
way to the grocery store when I looked up in time to see the Empire State
Building appear suddenly from nowhere like magic and then disappear again just
as suddenly, and the ticklish feeling I had that it had been done just to
entertain me.

I asked the lady if she remembered the foghorns and she said
she certainly did, especially in a neighborhood of Brooklyn where she’d lived once.
She told me that she remembered a long-ago New Year’s Eve when a whole bunch
of tugboats gathered in the narrows, that channel separating Brooklyn from
Staten Island, and played “Auld Lang Syne” with their foghorns. She smiled at
me. “It was so beautiful,” she said. She was going over to 23rd
Street to wait for the crosstown bus, she told me, so we said goodbye then. I watched
her walking away in her colorful scarves, and thought that the little story she’d
just told me was one of the prettiest things I’d ever heard.

October 3, 2016

copyright Romy Ashby

Posted by
Romy Ashby

5 comments:

Lovely piece Romy. The changing of the sound atmosphere in cities is really interesting and fog definitely affects sound quality. There are very few heavy fogs in London these days - they used to be known as pea-soupers and were often yellowish with smoke and sodium street lighting. The Clean Air Act in the early 1950's put an end to them, nobody was allowed to burn coal fires any more in the city and even the coal fired power stations had to take measures to reduce pollution. Electric or gas central heating in homes became more widespread after that. It made a huge difference to the air, the main pollutant now is vehicle exhausts.I love the story of the singing tugboats! Sue x

Beautiful. Not sure about here, but London has a lot of sites devoted to sounds of the city, like The London Sound Survey. Not the same as experiencing them in the real world but still very interesting. When I lived in England, I always enjoyed the sound of street market stallholders, newspaper hawkers, vendors selling roasted chestnuts. There aren't so many knife grinders in NY these days, but I love it when they roll around. A lot has changed, but the layers of sounds you hear walking around the city are still wonderful - floating fragments of conversation, a few bars of a song, trains coming in and out of stations, the catching your heart fire truck, a street preacher, the roaring of the nighttime carters, store shutters rising & falling - familiar, comforting music.I love your writing - thank you!